Death in motion…

The iconic execution photo in action and color. General Nguyen Ngoc Loan puts what’s probably a .38 Special into the head of a Viet Cong officer who was part of an execution squad murdering women and children.

Anyone who’s seen this photo/video and been filled with righteous disgust and indignation about how evil the Americans were in Vietnam, yet who wasn’t aware the man in the chequered shirt had just been caught literally red-handed slaughtering policemen’s families, you now have the other side of the story.

War is cruelty, and cannot be justified by any system of ethics which places value on human life. It exists and will continue to exist, regardless of irrelevant moral pontificating and lazy, hypocritical horseshit from people incapable of reactions more grown-up than knee-jerk horror. Deal with it on its own terms; countenance and engage with the fact that force is something which states and individuals, rational actors, still find a practical, convenient and sometimes necessary option. Anything else is delusion.